Grants Provided To Preserve Internment Sites

New Mexico – The National Park Service is taking applications for grants to preserve and do interpretation work on internment camps and other sites where more than 120,000 Japanese-Americans were detained during World War II.

Four sites in New Mexico could be eligible.

That's according to Kara Miyagishima of the Park Service's Intermountain Region in Denver.

She says there were internment camps in the Fort Stanton, Raton, Santa Fe and Lordsburg areas.

The agency plans meetings this winter in Denver, Honolulu, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and Omaha, Neb., for applicants under the Japanese American Confinement Sites program in fiscal year 2011, the program's third year.

In its first two years, it awarded more than $3.8 million to governments and groups working to preserve sites.